From the home front: Jay Shafer plans tiny house village; Boneyard Studios; Minim house

On both sides of the continent, people are moving toward the next step in the evolution of tiny houses: tiny house communities, modeled on mobile home parks but with a different sensibility for style and materials. (As with mobile home parks, whether the land parcels are owned or rented by the homeowners would depend on the individual park's legal setup.)

Cohousing village: Jay Shafer has deservedly been called the father of the tiny house movement, and he's been on the leading edge of the trend since its inception. The founder of Tumbleweed Tiny House Co., he left that company recently to pursue new ventures.

Four Lights is negotiating with Sonoma County, Calif., officials to develop the cohousing village under RV park zoning. The intent, according to Four Lights' website, is "to create a contagious model for responsible, affordable, desirable housing."

Four Lights' Gifford house.Four Lights Tiny House Co.

The plan is for 40 to 70 houses ranging in size from 270 to 700 square feet including sleeping lofts, arranged at a density of 16 to 22 houses per acre. (Just for perspective, consider that a Portland standard lot size of 5,000 square feet would work out to about 8 houses per acre -- but that's not taking into account the square footage required for streets.)

Amenities listed include an 800- to 1,600-square foot common house, private gardens and storage units, shared outdoor space, and "prominent pedestrian walkways out front with parking out back" at a rate of 1.5 parking spaces per house.

Four Lights says the community "will be structured as something like a co-op. Folks will own their own portable house and the small parcel it sits on, and they'll pay a set amount per month to maintain the common facilities."

The proposed opening date is 2015, and there's a disclaimer: "Any or all of these ideas might change if we think of something even better."

The Weller.Four Lights Tiny House Co.

Four Lights also has three new house designs -- the Gifford (112 square feet), the Weller (112 square feet), and the Marmara (284 square feet plus lofts; it also has a bed on the main floor) -- and Shafer pledges to continue steadily to create more. He also plans to design space-saving furniture suitable for tiny houses.

The village idea seems promising, as Shafer says on his website that Sonoma County zoning officials "seem to love this idea as much as we do." If you're interested in learning more about this project as it proceeds, you can sign up to receive email updates.

Shafer also has ramped up his workshops: For the first time, he’s offering a hands-on workshop in which participants will build a tiny house on wheels. The five-day workshop costs $1,199 and is slated for Feb. 16-20 in Sebastopol, Calif.

Tiny house model community: At the other side of the U.S., a group called Boneyard Studios has been building a tiny house model community -- "tiny" describes both the community and the houses -- in a Washington, D.C., alleyway, according to the Washington Post:

"As property values and rents rise across the city, we want to showcase this potential option for affordable housing," the group writes on its Web site. "We decided to live the questions: Can we build and showcase a few tiny homes on wheels in a DC urban alley lot? ... Not in the woods, but in a true community, connected to a neighborhood? Yes, we think. Watch out left coast, the DC adventure begins."

There's one problem: The city's zoning laws don't allow residential dwellings on alley lots unless they are a minimum of 30 feet wide, or roughly the width of a city street. D.C. is currently discussing lifting the 30-foot restriction. So, as Boneyard Studios continues to advocate more progressive zoning laws, it is using the property to showcase what could be.